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Giant African Baobab Trees Die Suddenly After Thousands of Years (theguardian.com)
Some of Africa's oldest and biggest baobab trees have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, according to researchers. From a report: The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and in some cases as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. "We report that nine of the 13 oldest ... individuals have died, or at least their oldest parts/stems have collapsed and died, over the past 12 years," they wrote in the scientific journal Nature Plants, describing "an event of an unprecedented magnitude." "It is definitely shocking and dramatic to experience during our lifetime the demise of so many trees with millennial ages," said the study's co-author Adrian Patrut of the Babes-Bolyai University in Romania. Among the nine were four of the largest African baobabs. While the cause of the die-off remains unclear, the researchers "suspect that the demise of monumental baobabs may be associated at least in part with significant modifications of climate conditions that affect southern Africa in particular." Further research is needed, said the team from Romania, South Africa and the United States, "to support or refute this supposition."
Makes you wonder. I have a oak that is about a century old on my property. The damn carpenter ants are attacking it. The arborist checked it out recently (I love this giant old tree). He said there is not much you can do. Bugs get oaks eventually its what ultimately kills them all. You take it down or you can just wait and let it fall down when its time comes (it won't hit anything but other trees) is what I was advised.
He also told me trees that age don't recover from shocks as easily as younger trees. Don't limb it anymore, if you want to let it go and see how long she lasts. Only cut obviously dead limbs out. Otherwise leave it alone, look enjoy don't touch. Was the rest of his advice.
A few points
1) Trees like all organisms have a finite life span (maybe these baobab trees are just getting to that age)
2) Trees like all things can only take so much abuse maybe being studied is in someway harmful to them.
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This has long been a concern of mine. Our area used to be in agricultural "Zone 2", meaning we'd usually experience a few day snap of -22F winter weather. This killed off a wide variety of non-native pests, such as those that arrived here on trucks and railcars from warmer clones during the summers. After a decade of record warm winters, we've been re-classified as Zone 4 and the transient beasts never die off now. So we've now got emerald ash borers; gypsy moths; new wasps, bees, and ants; and various roaches and snakes we've never had to deal with before, They're killing vast numbers of native trees and plants.
John
You aren't any kind of biological expert of any kind. This has nothing to do with CO2 affecting the tree, it's about the change in the climate, in particular in this case changing rainfall patterns in the area of the world where these trees grow.
They are blaming climate change because the trees exist in a part of the world that has seen one of the biggest changes in rainfall in the world over the last 20 years with around a 40% reduction in annual rainfall for over two decades. That change in rainfall amount has a drastic effect on the oldest trees because they are less able to handle changes and need significant amounts of water due to their size.
I call BS on this anecdote after reading into it.. most agricultural zone systems have levels separated by multiple degrees (F), and there's no place on earth that's experienced that level of warming over a single decade. The periods like that which I can find (they do exist) were typically in the past and part of random noise in the data; eg. there were always periods of very cold winters to follow. No different from flipping heads 10 times in a row - it does occur in large variable data sets but not common. Even the reference documentation I can find (all climate change advocate sites) note changes to ag zones typically occur over 30 year periods or more.
While local fauna may no doubt have to adapt to new threats in the future, the much, much larger and quicker threat is invasive species introduction by human means.
Oh and know what else that ag zone shift means? The area can support growing much more food, and much more valuable food.
over 50 some years my area has gone from a low zone 4 to a mid zone 5... while we haven't been reclassified officially on the maps, the reality is the annual low temperatures aren't getting down to the -30f they used too... they are only getting down to -15F or -10F...
If a region was a high zone 2 they could very reasonable be a zone 4 now...
So I call BS on your call of BS, because I've watched it happen as I've been gardening, but if that's not enough, here is some data from a meteorologist... https://blogs.mprnews.org/updraft/2016/01/thursday-thaw-how-cold-will-minnesota-get-this-winter/